Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Putting Lipstick on a Pig

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Have you heard the phrase ‘you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig’? It’s a common phrase that I’ve heard perhaps hundreds of times before. It refers to the fact that superficial, external gloss does not change the underlying, ugly nature of a thing. Microsoft’s ill-fated Windows Vista operating system is a fine example of a product that can be accurately described with this clever bit of slang.

Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) recently used the term in reference to Republican Presidential nominee Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) efforts to co-opt Obama’s mantra of ‘change’:

“You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig. You can wrap up an old fish in a piece of paper and call it change. It’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough.”

In a shameless example of sex-baiting that should be beneath McCain, his campaign has accused Obama of using a sexist slur against his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK). Of course, it’s quite silly since in October of last year McCain himself used the term when talking about Senator Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) health care plan:

“I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”

So was that a sexist slur again Clinton? No. Nor was Obama’s comment a sexist slur against Palin. Can we please talk about real issues, rather than fabricating goofy claims of sexism, racism, and so on out of innocent comments made on the campaign trail?

Fannie and Freddie Dying a Slow Death

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Succumbing to the home loan ‘crisis’ they (and poorly-educated home buyers) created, the federal government has seized control of the Federal National Mortgage Association (’Fannie Mae’) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (’Freddie Mac’).

I’ve written a bit about this before and my general disdain toward hybrid public/private organizations. Trying to conglomerate public and private goals never works well for anybody—if you need proof look at Amtrak, the Postal Service, the DC-area Metro transit system, or any public university. Hybrid organizations were intended to combine the best features of government with the best features of private industry; instead, they usually combine the worst.

All-in-all, since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are essentially banks, it makes sense for the government to seize control as they teeter on the brink of insolvency. After the great depression, the government is well equipped to take over failing banks. The big test is what they do next, and I certainly hope they don’t nationalize our mortgage system. The government, I’m sure, could mess this whole thing up even worse than the hybrids did.

The only logical solution is privitization. The discredited hulks of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be sold as quickly as possible to the highest private bidder. I have no doubt that some enterprising corporation out there would be able to steer one or both of these ill-fated hybrids to private-sector profitability if given the opportunity.

Joining the 21st Century: HDTV

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So, Melissa and I have always been fairly cutting-edge with computers and technology, but we’re not big TV watchers so our TV has never been a priority. We had been hopelessly behind-the-times with a CRT-based, non-DV, 20-something-inch television.

Well, no more. We finally caved and bought a 37″ flat-panel LCD HDTV. The times, they are a-changin’.

Problem is that we have an old DVD player that doesn’t work well on through the HDTV, so that needs to be replaced too, and we also have to upgrade our DirecTV plan a bit. It adds up, but we probably won’t upgrade again for another eight years or more so it’s no big deal :-).

Website 20.1 Revision

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Today I have launched a minor revision to the web site, bringing the version to 20.1. This is the first significant change to the site since I launched v.20 in April, marking the switch to the WordPress content management system. Here are just a couple of quick highlights:

  • Visual tweaks and adjustments (as always, these ‘minor revisions’ are where I start playing with new design cues that, if I like them, end up being a part of the next major redesign).
  • Adjustments to the display of list-view pages (for tags and categories). There was a lot of inconsistency before, which has been ironed out and these pages should work better across-the-board now. You’ll see a lot of improvement on the tag indexes (and, over the next few days, I’m going to aggressively tag all my old, un-tagged content).
  • Improvements to the LoFi view for mobile browsers—it should be a bit easier and faster to navigate around on the tiny-screen now.
  • Improvements to browser support—most notably the initiation of support for the Internet Explorer 8 betas (which had butchered my site previously) and some improvements in the new Google Chrome browser.

Robert Novak: How a Tumor Is Changing My Life

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I’m no particular fan of conservative columnist Robert Novak, nor am I a fan of liberal Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), but both have found themselves in dire medical straits with recent diagnoses of serious brain tumors. I wish both of them the absolute best, and my prayers go out to them.

Novak, who announced his retirement from being a full-time columnist shortly after his diagnosis, returns with an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post about his condition and what has happened since things started going downhill for him in July. You may remember that shortly before his diagnosis people were condemning Novak as a criminal who had hit a pedestrian in downtown Washington with his Corvette (which he was known to drive a bit too fast) and tried to drive away without stopping. It turns out that Novak really didn’t see the man he hit, and was likely disoriented due to a tumor he didn’t even know he had until days later.

Most touchingly, Novak—who is ideologically unfriendly toward Senator Kennedy, and vice-versa—has found support from the Kennedy family, including the Senator. It is nice to see a couple of opinionated folks on opposite sides of the political fence put their differences aside and be human toward one another; something that happens fairly often, but rarely gets attention.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.